He’s serious. The CTO of D-Wave Systems says “massive amounts of money” are now going into artificial intelligence research, because “Microsoft, Google, Apple and other companies all want to dominate the mobile space, and to do that you need compelling applications… All of that requires better AI.”

D-Wave Systems worked with Google on the “Google Goggles” mobile phone app for augmented reality, using their systems to “teach” a neural network how to recognize objects like automobiles, and then transferring those algorithms to the mobile app. And to do it they used subatomic “quantum computing” – a crucial stepping stone to human-level artificial intelligence.

“I’m very excited by the possibility of building very effective unsupervised learning systems and contributing in a meaningful way to the creation of better-than-human level intelligence in machines,” says D-Wave’s CTO, adding “The existence of vast machine sentience is almost guaranteed to occur.”